Sonic the Hedgehog: Metal Memory
a fanfic by Pastey
It has been eight years since the survivors of Dr. Robotnik's invasion and capture of Mobotropolis fled to the refuge of Knothole Village, and three years since the Freedom Fighters began to strike back.
Battles have been won and lost, but the war still rages on. Sonic's roboticized uncle, Sir Charles, has been freed from his enslavement and for the past year has been assisting the Freedom Fighters as both spy and robotic engineer.
In the past week the renamed city of Robotropolis has become unusually quiet and the freedom fighters have been conducting reconnaissance missions to find out why. Meanwhile, a breakthrough is about to be made in Rotor's workshop…
Chapter 1: Calm before the Storm
"There's a chance that this isn't going to work." warned Rotor from behind a control station in his work shop. "I'm positive it won't hurt you, let alone kill you, but it may simply not work."
Tails was undaunted by the metal cap, despite its striking resemblance to the infamous "lightning crowns" of Downunda prison's execution ward. He gleefully removed it from its charging holder and strapped it onto his head. The wire-draped dome forced him to fold his ears back and down, which was slightly uncomfortable, but well worth it in his mind. Once the cap was snug, he plopped into the armchair on the testing pad. "Let's go! Fire it up! I can't wait to sort through my own memories!" chimed the fox while bouncing in his seat.
Rotor couldn't help but laugh at the sight of the twelve year old boy wearing an obscenely large metal bowl on his head while fidgeting around. He stifled his chuckles so he could speak. "Don't you think you should wait for Uncle Chuck? This wouldn't have even been possible if it weren't for—"
"Oh, nonsense…" the raspy robotic voice of Uncle Chuck interrupted, "…You two egg-heads would have solved this puzzle just as well without me getting in the way!" As Sir Charles's metal feet clanked onto the steel plate floor of the workshop, Tails leaned out the side of the chair and turned his head as far as he could.
"Hi Uncle Chuck!" he said while waving happily. "Glad you made it in time!"
Charles came up to the young test subject's side with a smile creaking out beneath his metal whiskers. "That's some handsome head-gear, m'boy!" Rotor gave the old veteran a nod and a simple hello. Charles's attention shifted to the lavender walrus.
"Sonic and Bunnie still aren't back from their scouting mission in Robotropolis, but I'm sure they wouldn't want to keep you lads waiting. By all means if you're ready to begin, do so! I'm dying to see if this actually works."
Rotor nodded and flipped the power to the monitoring system. He then began fiddling with the settings for the device. "Like I was telling Tails earlier, there is always a chance that something won't work, but I see no reason why it shouldn't. We all know that roboticizing technology can transfer memories of an organic Mobian brain into the disk space of a synthetic Robian hard drive. The cap essentially does the same thing, only instead of following through with the roboticizing process; it just copies the information in the brain and uploads it into a completely separate hard drive. Memories, personality, old habits… everything." Rotor stopped for a moment to regard the Robian hard drive on the receiving pedestal.
Tails grew silent as Chuck offered it a mournful gaze and began to speak. "I didn't know him before Robotnik took over. He might have been someone's brother, or someone's father… some poor soul's son. I only ever knew him as unit H-55-935, even after I was freed and began spying in Robotnik's factories. Now, because of a freak electrical discharge that could have just as easily wiped my drive, nobody will ever really know who he was."
Rotor gave a dejected sigh. "His death won't be in vane. Using his drive, I can learn how to sort through and resurface an individual's personality buried beneath archives of Robotnik's brain-washing software. He will free hundreds, maybe even thousands of Robians from their mental prisons. It's a huge step in taking back our world, Charles."
The cobalt Robian shrugged off the melancholy overtones. "I suppose you're right, Boomer."
Tails giggled whilst the walrus rolled his eyes in dismay. "Please, Uncle Chuck, I haven't been called Boomer since I was six."
Uncle Chuck quickly covered his mouth with his hand in feigned shock. "Sorry about that, sonny! Old habit."
The young fox in the chair could no longer manage his anxiety. "Hey, we gonna copy my brain or what?!" He proclaimed with both hands placed firmly on the metal dome.
Charles took a place next to Rotor behind the control panel. The walrus looked up, calling to Tails. "Ready over there, Tails?!" The boy stretched a mile-wide smile and nodded eagerly, clutching the arms of the chair as if he were expecting it to blast off. With that, Rotor pushed a small green button and immediately the headset on Tails began to hum. As it did so, Tails seemed to loose his fix on the control panel and his gaze steadily wandered upward vacantly. The hum slowly turned into a high pitch whine before a bright green flash escaped from around Tails' head under the cap. This seemed to release the boy from his brief moment of hypnosis, leaving him a bit dizzy. A shake of the head and a rub of an eye and Tails was back to normal.
"Was that it?! Did it work?!" Tails asked frantically from the chair, motioning to Rotor whether or not he could take off the helmet yet.
Rotor flipped a few switches and signaled back at Tails that he could indeed remove the helmet. "We'll know if it worked in a little bit. It's in the middle of uploading all of your data into the hard drive. I'd imagine this won't take too long, especially since you're so young. If we were to do this with someone Uncle Chuck's age however, we could be here for hours."
The metal hedgehog crossed his arms while turning to stare at Rotor. "I'm not THAT old…" he grimaced.
"Oh come on, you had it coming after that Boomer comment!" laughed Rotor before returning to his naturally analytical self. "It'll probably take thirty or forty minutes at this rate."
Tails' face went from elated to horrified. "THIRTY MINUTES?!" cried the fox.
"Sorry bud! You could go get something to eat from Rosie if you want…" Rotor stopped, noticing that he was quite hungry himself. "Actually if you don't mind, could you bring something back for me too? I missed breakfast and I'm famished."
Tails didn't really want to leave the shop, but he didn't want to just wait around doing nothing for thirty whole minutes either. "Alright then, I'll be back in a sonic-second!" he announced before dashing out the door as fast as he could.
Charles laughed lightly as he watched the door slowly swing shut. "I think more of my nephew is rubbing off on him than is healthy."
Rotor finished tweaking the controls and turned to Charles. "I wouldn't worry. He's got the rest of Knothole rubbing off on him to balance it out." he remarked with a grin.
As tails trotted across the commons of Knothole, a familiar sound caught his attention. He skidded to a halt and spun around to see Sonic doing the same thing, only over a distance of about fifty feet and kicking up a huge dust cloud.
"I'm baaack!" called the blue hedgehog to anyone who could hear him. As he noticed Tails running up to meet him, his trademark smirk moved up his muzzle. "Hey buddy! Glad to see you still have your head!" he joked while messing up Tails' hair. "I guess that means the experiment was a success, huh?"
Tails smiled while fixing his hair. "We haven't finished yet! My brain patterns are still being uploaded into H-55's old hard drive. There's probably terabytes of data that's going into—" Sonic interrupted with a confused noise while scratching his head behind his ear.
"You lost me at brain-patterns and hard-data… tera-disks…" he trailed off. Sonic noticed Tails' expression of disappointment and perked back up. "I'll come see it when it's finished, but first I have to go with Bunnie to tell Sally about the mission."
Tails' normal joyful face returned. "Ok Sonic. I'll meet you in Rotor's lab!" As Tails began running off towards Rosie's kitchen he heard the sound of someone else returning home; jets powering down and metal limbs making contact with hard dirt. "Hi Bunnie!" Tails called while waving.
She waved back with her left, non-metallic hand. "Hi there sugah!" she answered before turning to Sonic who stood tapping his foot waiting for her. They began walking toward the meeting hut. "I know you're the fastest guy on two feet, sugah-hog, but I can't help but feel a lil' let down every time you beat me back home!" explained Bunnie in her southern drawl.
Sonic chuckled a bit. "Hey don't worry about it. All the same though, I wouldn't be holding my breath for a win any time soon." He bragged.
Bunnie rolled her eyes at Sonic and moved her roboticized hand to brush her droopy ear out of her face. As it came near her head though, the metal arm jerked all on its own, causing Bunnie to clock herself in the temple with her own knuckles. The cybernetic rabbit would have fallen over from the blow had Sonic not been paying attention and caught her. He held her up by putting her faulty arm around his shoulders.
"Holy cow, are you okay? I think I heard that bounce off your skull…" asked Sonic while trying to get a look at the damage.
She gritted her teeth in pain while cradling her head with her organic arm then managed to grunt out a response. "My robot-limbs have been actin' like they out to kill me lately. I really need to have Rotor check me up." She loosed her metal arm from Sonic's shoulders and continued walking, despite his offers to just bring Sally to her so she could sit down for a bit. Holding her head, Bunnie and Sonic continued to the meeting hut.
Make-shift and multi-purpose was the theme around which the entire village was built and Knothole's meeting hut was no exception. It served as town hall, classroom, dance hall, and from time to time, war room. This particular structure was the largest in the village, with a wide roof supported by three massive fir trees which grew in nearly a strait line. Additional rafter work allowed the floor space of the meeting hut to be completely free of obstruction other than the three trunks. Today the building was empty, save for a rusty-red haired figure sitting alone at one of the long tables. As the blue hedgehog pushed the front doors open and entered with his cybernetic companion, Sally Acorn took notice and placed her personal computer, Nicole, on the table.
"Whenever any of us come home from that awful place I give thanks…" she stopped upon noticing Bunnie holding her throbbing head. "Oh my gosh, were you attacked?" inquired Sally in a very concerned voice.
Bunnie frowned and sighed. "Not unless you mean attacked by myself." she answered while shaking her mechanical arm as if to keep it limber. "I can trust swat-bots more than my limbs these days." Sally gave her arm a glance and continued. "I really hope that's an exaggeration. We should get you to Rotor's shop after this."
Sonic unfolded his arms so that he could use them to lean forward on the table. "Speaking of swat-bots, we saw next to no troop movement in Robotropolis… again. The only clunkers we saw were patrols and they were really deep in; almost nowhere further Ro-butt-nik's command tower."
Bunnie added to the brief. "Today I was spotted by a hover-cam. I went 'round a corner without checking and bam; lil' floating eye about THIS far from my nose." She held her left hand about five inches from her face like a wall. "I grabbed then smashed it to bits in a heart beat, but I know it saw me. All the same though, no alarms! Nothing, not even one chrome dome comes a-runnin'. It's like nobody's at the farm."
Sally leaned with her back against the wall with her arms crossed. She looked up at the ceiling of the hut in thought for a few seconds before speaking again. "The only time we've seen Robotnik's grip loosen like this was after the E.V.E. incident. We thought his creation had wiped him out before continuing on to travel the galaxy but it turned out that he had simply been transported elsewhere. That absence only lasted a few days though, and when he came back everything went back to its horribly normal self." She threw a glance to Sonic. "This could be the best shot we've had in years to do some critical, irreversible damage to his operation."
Sonic smirked mischievously at the notion. "Now you're speaking my language!" he cheered while shaking a fist.
Sally quickly cut him off. "HOWEVER," she started loudly, "it is also very likely that he is simply staging this whole thing. The previous mission showed us that there aren't any extra robots in the scrap dumps or the slag plants. It's not like all those units just up and disappeared. This could very easily be a trap for us, though he'd be taking more risks than we normally see him take with this one."
Sonic shrugged indifferently and began pacing as Bunnie stepped forward. "Trap or no, we've got ourselves an opportunity here Sally-girl. We should probably do something a lil' more… offensive… than sneakin' around back-alleys 'n such." Sally nodded in agreement as she pulled away from the wall and picked up Nicole.
After bending over to clip her little machine to the top of her left boot she stood up, brushing her hair back behind her ears with one hand (a maneuver that almost always caught Sonic's undivided attention). "We'll put a plan together with the whole team tonight. Right now though, Rotor, Charles, and our little engineer Tails have cooked up something we should check out." With that, the briefing was over and the trio proceeded to leave the meeting hut together.
At another end of the village Tails was exiting Rosie's kitchen holding a couple plates of tuna-fish sandwich bites, cuisine that both he and Rotor were quite fond of. Following close behind him was none other than Antoine D'Coolette, dressed as close to casual as he ever got in his Royal Guard uniform. He raised an eyebrow to the fox's selection of lunch, holding one hand behind him while gesturing with the other as he began his commentary.
"A bit on zee, how do you say... or-ni-dairy, side oui?" He asked in his heavy French accent.
Tails answered over his shoulder, "I think you mean 'or-di-nary', An'twan." elongating each syllable so that his verbally defunct friend could easily understand the correction. The effort, however, soon seemed to be in vain.
"Oui, zis eez what I am saying! Or-ni-dairy, non?" insisted the coyote while thumbing his chin. "One of zeese days I will have to prepare zee escargot for you, Tails. Eet will leave you... wizout zee speech."
Tails scrunched his face and produced an overly dramatic gagging noise. "Yuck, I'm not eating snails! And before you say it, I'm never going to try frog legs either."
Antoine protested. "No cuisses de grenouilles?! I swear to you zere eez nothing better!" Tails would have none of it though, shaking his head to himself. The vain coyote gave up, opting to instead straiten out his blue uniform and fix his hair. "Fine zen, more for moi." He moved ahead of Tails as they reached Rotor's shop so he could open the door for the full-handed fox.
Inside, just about all the Freedom Fighters were already there. Sonic, Sally, Bunnie, Rotor, and Sir Charles were all crammed where they could fit themselves around the monitor next to the receiving pedestal. It was Charles who noticed the door open first. "Great timing, the data has just finished transferring." Tails gave a gleeful hurray as he hurried over to the group, finding a place between Sonic and Rotor.
Rotor noted the plates of tuna-fish sandwiches. "Ah, our stomachs think as one!" he joked, taking a snack off one of the plates that Tails set on the monitor table. After downing a bite, he addressed the group. "Alright! So, you guys all know that the three of us have been toiling away in this lab for the better part of a year now working on this little number. Well we finally have something to show for it! Tails has very generously shared the memories of his entire life for the first live test. We should be able to display anything he's seen and heard but there isn't a media format to present things like taste, touch or smell. At least not yet anyway." He stopped in the middle of his presentation to ponder his last sentence. "That gives me another project idea..."
Sonic snapped his fingers a couple times to get Rotor's attention. "Hello? Mobius to Rotor! The brain thing?" he reminded him. Rotor quickly responded to the wake up call.
"Oh yeah, as I was saying;" continued Rotor "we should be able to see and hear Tails' memories through this monitor station. So without any further holdups, lets see what Tails remembers."
A few strokes on the keyboard and the monitor was on. For a few seconds, all that came through were jumbled patterns of color and the garbled sounds of what might have been voices. Soon enough though the first clear images started to appear...
